1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system, a method and a program, which are utilized in mobile communication terminals such as mobile phone terminals, personal digital assistants (PDA) or the like, for storing and managing the user's personal information.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, a mobile phone terminal has a telephone book (or referred to as an address book) called a memory dial that stores personal information, and the data stored in the telephone book can be used to easily perform an operation for sending electronic mail (e-mail) or for making a call. The data stored in the telephone book, however, cannot commonly be transferred to other mobile phone terminals except for a part of the data such as telephone numbers. For this reason, for example, when another mobile phone terminal has to be used as an alternative device to deliver the mobile phone terminal of the user's own for repair, it has been impossible to transfer the data of such mail addresses, stored in the telephone book of the mobile phone terminal, to the alternative device and to use the transferred data in the alternative device.
When a mobile phone terminal is replaced with a terminal of another communication carrier, the data is rewritten in the telephone book in the renewed mobile phone terminal, or alternatively the data, which have been stored in the original telephone book, are copied to a PC (a personal computer) and then the copied data are moved to a telephone book of the renewed mobile phone terminal. This task, however, takes a lot of trouble.
In this connection, mobile phone terminals have been proposed which are configured such that all the personal information stored in a telephone book can also be used for another mobile phone terminal. For example, JP 2001-86220 (hereinafter, referred to as Patent Document 1) describes a mobile phone device provided with a removable personal-information storing means for storing personal information. In this mobile phone device, the telephone book's personal information is stored in the personal-information storing means that is installed in the mobile phone device. The personal information of a telephone book can be used in any mobile phone device by installing the personal-information storing means in the desired mobile phone device.
In addition to the above described Patent Document 1, JP2003-46634 (hereinafter, referred to as Patent Document 2) describes a mobile phone terminal provided with a SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card. In the mobile phone terminal of this type, telephone-book data stored in a SIM card can be used as well in another mobile phone terminal.
Explanation next regards problems of conventional mobile phone terminals.
As described above, conventional mobile phone terminals have been inconvenient, because it has been impossible to use telephone-book data of a mobile phone terminal, as is, in an alternative device or a new mobile phone terminal. In addition, in copying telephone-book data to a PC or the like, it has been necessary to use a medium such as a data-link cable, memory card or the like, which was trouble some to set up. In addition, in conventional mobile phone terminals, there are other problems as described below.
In cases where a mobile phone terminal is lost or left behind somewhere, it is feared that personal information stored in the mobile phone may be illegally used by another person.
Furthermore, a memory storage capacity in a mobile phone terminal is predetermined for each device model, and a user who wishes to store many items of information in a telephone book has had to purchase high storage-capacity mobile phone terminals which are high priced. In addition, in cases where the user wishes to save information in excess of the maximum storage capacity of the mobile phone terminal, he or she has had to purchase an external memory card. Furthermore, a mobile phone terminal commonly has a storage capacity memory designed to store a predetermined number of items of the telephone-book data that are to be saved. Thus, a case may happen that this storage capacity provides superfluous memory for a user who handles only a small amount of the telephone-book information. Above described problems impose an excessive cost burden on the user.
While the mobile phone terminals described in Patent Documents 1 and 2 allow the telephone-book data to be utilized in other mobile phone terminals as well, these mobile phone terminals require memories for downloading telephone-book data into other mobile phone terminals, and this entails cost burdens for the user as described above. In addition, neither of these mobile phone terminals are capable of effecting operations such as transmitting e-mail via a PC or the like, based on the telephone-book data installed in the mobile phone terminal, while a telephone call is in progress using that terminal.